Adobe Groups provides a place on Adobe.com where designers and developers from around the world can create a profile, connect with members of the community, join Adobe user groups, and do much more. Community Manager John Koch explains. Transcript.

Julie Campagna: Hi, I'm Julie Campagna. I manage The Edge newsletter. Today, I'm with John Koch, who is going to tell us a little bit about Adobe Groups. But, first John, why don't you tell us what you do at Adobe?

John Koch: Sure. I'm a member of the community team. There are five of us, and we work to support the community. I generally focus on communities outside of North America.

Julie: What is Adobe Groups?

John: It's a new area on the Adobe website. It is groups.adobe.com. It's a place where the community can go and make a profile, find other community members and join user groups. There are job boards, there is an events calendar and there is a personal profile page, where you can add anything you want about yourself to tell the community.

J
ulie: Can anybody join Groups?

John: Anybody. You need to have an Adobe membership ID. Then once you're on the site, you can create your profile and go for it - start meeting other people and joining groups.

Julie: Do you support languages other than English?

John: Yeah. We support virtually all languages, with the exception of right to left languages.

John: There is a Russian community that has pretty much changed the whole site into Russian. That's great to see; it's very impressive.
John: There is one group from Hong Kong. They've taken the site, and they've actually localized a lot of it into Chinese. But, they also keep a lot of English content on there as well.

Julie: Have there been any other successes with Adobe Groups?

John: People have commented that this is really helping them a lot, because they've wanted to start a user group, they've wanted to have more community in their local city or country, and they really didn't know where to start. This is giving them a lot of ideas, a lot of structure and, yeah, a lot of motivation to make sure that their community is part of the larger world-wide community. They can be part of this exciting thing.

We thought that one of the things that Adobe Groups can do is to provide user group managers with some resources, like hosting and other things, so they don't have to spend their time worrying about that. It's just very easy. They just put their information in there, upload some updates to their site, and then they can focus on doing the other things that they like to do.

Julie: Well, John, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us under the Bay Bridge and tell us about Adobe Groups.

John: Sure, you bet. Thank you.

Julie: If you want to join Adobe Groups or go check it out, the URL is groups.adobe.com. I